Officials in West Fear Worst if
a Major Drought Strikes Colorado River

LAS VEGAS&emdash;Inspector Dave Hunt is
back on his beat, roaming this strange desert city on an urgent
mission. He is searching for anyone wasting water.

It is another hot, dry morning, and Hunt is
wheeling his dusty truck into one of the many plush new residential
communities rising up on the edge of town. He cruises past soaked
green lawns that seem out of place in the scorched climate and
sand-swept streets whose names sound like jokes: Breakwater Drive,
Moonlight Bay, Gull's Landing. He eyes sprinklers, hoses and even
drains near a man-made lake for hints of trouble, which is never hard
to find.

"You want to know what we're up against?" Hunt, an
investigator for the Las Vegas Valley Water District, asks as he
spots a suspicious stream flowing alongside a curb. "When I
confronted one guy a while back about the sprinkler he was using, he
got so angry he poked me in the chest and he said, 'Man, with all
these new rules, you people are trying to turn this place into a
desert.' "

Such are the signs of a struggle, both comic and
serious, unfolding across the desert West. From the outskirts of
metropolitan Los Angeles and San Diego, and across the flat, barren
expanse of Nevada and Arizona, cities are going to new extremes to
conserve water and are begging, even bribing, residents to start
living with a profound new appreciation for the limits of natural
resources.

It is an enormous undertaking, for few habits are
as old and hard to break in this arid region than recklessly guzzling
water. And the latest stampede of settlers, manifesting their
destinies in cul-de-sacs and casino jobs, is responding to the
desperate call for a conservation ethic with as much anger and
confusion as compliance.

"There is a mind-set here that since water is such
a necessity for life, God or the government will just take care of it
so that there will always be enough," Hunt said. "That's the kind of
thinking we have to change."

In Southern California, some local
governments are trying to conserve by giving residents free low-flush
toilets and building water-recycling plants on the grounds of new
residential developments. In Arizona, golf courses are being
redesigned with less natural turf and more efficient irrigation
systems. In Las Vegas, a city that revels in its excesses, new
campaigns to save water are even more unusual and
aggressive.

As part of a "cash for grass" program, authorities
here have begun giving residents as much as $400 each to replace
their lawns with a more appropriate landscape of rocks and desert
plants. They are even offering skeptics free seminars on ways to do
it. Residents who convert to automated sprinkler clocks instead of
old and unreliable timers set by hand are being paid about
$50.

The city also approved controversial restrictions
recently on how much natural turf can be in the front yards of new
homes and around businesses. As part of the crackdown, all turf must
be at least 10 feet wide and also be at least 2 feet from sidewalks
and walls--so sprinkler water is not wasted.

Fairways on golf courses are being narrowed, and
water officials have given thousands of residents free shower heads
that limit water flow. In the blazing summer months, the water
authority also is hiring dozens of "water cops" to wander through
neighborhoods in search of conservation violations. The city even has
a new hot line to which residents can tattle on neighbors wasting
water.

Last year, it logged about 30,000 tips.

The West has always had a tough time balancing its
water supply and demand. As early as the 1950s, there were campaigns
reminding residents new to the desert that "too much splash is rash."
But those shortages and warnings seem quaint compared to the crisis
the region is beginning to face now.

Soaring population and the lifestyles that many
newcomers insist on are sapping the area's limited water supplies
like never before. Arizona leads the nation in new housing permits
and southern Nevada, with its booming casino industry, is expanding
at a breakneck pace. Metropolitan Las Vegas is welcoming as many as
5,000 new residents per month, along with more than 20 million
tourists a year. And sometimes it seems like they all play
golf.

In the mid-1980s, planners here predicted that
there would be about 650,000 people living around Las Vegas by 2000.
There are already about twice that many, and town house complexes are
still being built farther into the Mohave Desert, which usually gets
no more than four inches of rainfall a year.

"We can't treat this problem like we used to--with
a crisis response, then back to business as usual," said Pat Mulroy,
general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. "Now, this is
something that will be a serious issue for everyone, all the time, in
every southwestern community."

Some residential groups in Las Vegas are heeding
that message and trying to change their habits. The Painted Desert
Homeowners Association, a planned 450-acre community on the edge of
the city, is proposing to remove grass from all common areas on the
site and it may drain much of its man-made lake.

But both ideas face opposition. "People really
bring their landscape culture with them when they come here," said
Bill Mullin, who moved to the Painted Desert community in Las Vegas
from Oregon two years ago with his wife. "They say they can't live
without the green. You hear them say, 'I don't want to live like it's
a desert.' But it is. We can't keep pretending it isn't
anymore."

Glenn Beahn, an Ohio native who lives in another
sprawling green residential complex, said he has long resisted giving
up his grass, even though it never grew the way he wanted. All the
upkeep costs--a $50 monthly water bill, for starters--finally wore
him down. He converted to a desert landscape last week.

"You know that water is precious out here, but
it's still hard to change," he said. "There are a lot of people who
say, 'It's my property, and I'll pay for all the damn water I want,
so leave me alone.' I can respect that."

But now even powerful local interests such as the
Southern Nevada Homeowners Association, which is constructing about
20,000 properties a year and still cannot keep pace with demand, are
joining the cry for conservation. It supported new turf limits and is
installing more efficient plumbing in homes even though that step is
pricing some customers out of the Las Vegas housing
market.

"People are slowly starting to see the
implications of waste," said Jo Anne Jensen, a director of the
association. "We've gone from almost no regulations on water use to
regulations on practically every little thing."

The three states that need water most--Arizona,
California and Nevada--have a complex agreement to share the Colorado
River, which flows near the region. But the pace of growth in all
three states is so swift that demand for water is beginning to exceed
the supply that some cities receive. Water officials are already
starting to fear the dire implications if a major drought strikes the
river in the coming years.

The frontier mentality that still thrives in the
West also makes it difficult for elected officials to win much
support for curtailing growth. The largest planned community ever
proposed in Los Angeles County, a development of nearly 22,000 homes
in the dry Santa Clarita Valley, won approval recently. And Las Vegas
keeps building monstrous resorts that bring more jobs and more
people--and more demand for homes and water.

"Since so many people who already live here just
came from somewhere else, it's hard to tell others who also want to
come that they can't," Hunt said.

Preaching the cause of conservation, officials
say, is their next best hope.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority now conserves
about 15 percent of its annual water supply, its best showing ever.
Just five years ago, when it did not spend any money promoting
conservation, it saved less than half that amount. But the region
still has a long way to go. Water officials say their goal 10 years
from now is to be conserving more than one-fourth of their water
supply.

Some of the strides are significant. In the past
two years, more than half of the residents who purchased homes in Las
Vegas have been persuaded to put desert landscapes on their property
instead of lawns, for example. Other initiatives, even those enticing
residents with wads of cash, are a harder sell.

So far, only about 70 customers are participating
in the water authority's new "cash for grass" rebate program and
giving up their lawns. Only about 300 have earned $50 for replacing
antiquated sprinkler clocks. Some old-timers here who have never had
to live with so much regulation of water are resisting the changes,
as are some newcomers who cannot imagine life without
lawns.

"Some people feel 'Big Brother' is getting very
intrusive in their most personal space, their homes," Mulroy
said.

Nearly two-thirds of the water supply in
metropolitan Las Vegas goes to residential use, the bulk of it for
lawn and outdoor plant care. The 5,000-room resorts that tower over
the city's famous, or infamous, gambling strip consume only about 8
percent of the water, mostly because they have the money to recycle
much of what they use. Elaborate water treatment plants have been
built in the basements of some of the biggest new casinos.

But that fact is lost on many residents who see
bizarre spectacles like the block-long artificial lake outside the
new Bellagio resort and wonder why they cannot plant grass in their
front yards or take lengthy showers anymore.

Dave Hunt, the water cop, hears the gripes all the
time. He listens, but he is too much the crusader as he patrols, cell
phone on his hip, ever ready to report even the smallest signs of
waste, to back down.

"The problem is everywhere," he said one recent
morning as he rambled through another new desert neighborhood. "You
see all those palm trees? They didn't grow here. Someone put them in.
People don't realize that. And a palm tree needs 250 gallons a
day!"

Next stop, a rolling green hill next to a small
fake lake. Hunt sighed.

"We have a lot of work to do," he said. "People
think conservation is just the latest fad, or some government scheme.
We have to get them to accept it as a way of life."

Slowing the
Spigot

Western regions, such as southern Nevada, are
promoting water conservation in the home.